Flint sells produce in a building that once printed the newspaper

The presses that once printed the Flint Journal are long gone, but the building still smells like a market should — bread, coffee, fish on ice. The Flint Farmers’ Market has filled the old newspaper plant at 300 East First Street since June 2014, and the move put it almost exactly where it began.

Flint has had a market in one form or another since 1905, when farmers backed their wagons up to the corner of Beach and Kearsley Streets and sold straight off the bed. It wandered over the years — across the river to Smith Street in 1912, then back downtown after World War I to Harrison and Union, on the ground where the University of Michigan-Flint library stands now. For decades it sat in a low building down by the river. By the early 2010s it had simply outgrown the place.

The fix was unusual. Instead of building new, Uptown Reinvestment Corporation — the nonprofit that took the market over in 2002, back when the city had talked about closing it — gutted the shuttered Journal printing facility downtown and turned the press hall into vendor stalls. The brick and the bones of an industrial building are still there; you can read the old structure overhead while you buy honey under it.

Inside today are roughly fifty year-round vendors, with rows of seasonal growers spilling outside from May through October. You can get Koegel’s by the link, a tamale, fresh trout, a haircut, and a pint of blueberries without leaving the block. The market has picked up national notice along the way, but the everyday point of it is simpler: a working downtown room where a farmer from the county still hands you the thing they grew.